My amazing wife and I just returned from seeing the new documentary, Melania, and both of us came away from the experience respecting the First Lady more than we already did beforehand. The grace, fierce determination, charm, and class Mrs. Trump has shown since being thrust back into the national spotlight has been inspiring to see. And that's not fawning. That's just obvious by looking at her first year in office. Yes, First Ladies have terms, too, where they're supposed to do something constructive for the country.
The closing credits of the film listed accomplishments of the first year of the First Lady's second term. Paraphrased, it goes like this:
- Championing and passage of the Take It Down Act (federal legislation criminalizing non-consensual publication of intimate images online, including AI-generated/deepfakes, with a focus on protecting children and victims).
- Signing/implementation of an Executive Order on "Fostering the Future for American Children & Families" (supporting foster youth transitions through education, employment, housing, mentoring, and related programs, including $25 million in funding/partnerships via HUD).
- Launching the Presidential AI Challenge and a National K-12 AI Program (encouraging students to develop AI solutions for community issues).
- Hosting a White House Task Force/Roundtable on AI Education.
- Efforts to reunite Ukrainian and Russian children/families (tied to broader world peace and child welfare advocacy amid the ongoing conflict).
- Launching a global coalition ("Fostering the Future Together") at the UN General Assembly with international first spouses to promote safe technology, innovation, and child empowerment.
- Continuation/expansion of the Be Best initiative (from her first term, focused on child well-being, online safety, and cyberbullying prevention, referenced in discussions like her video call with Brigitte Macron).
Critics were quick to pile on, saying everything about the film - the subject, her husband, the fact that he got elected again, accomplishments, anything to do with the inauguration last year is a blight on the progressive utopia they envisioned once Kamala Harris was sworn in. But the reality is Melania Trump is a strong woman, a great mother, and one of the most elegant First Ladies we've ever had. She just exudes class.
Now let's compare that to the February 1st Vogue feature by Maya Singer on California Governor Gavin Newsom, whom Singer would greatly appreciate you falling in love with, as she has, and vote for him in the 2028 presidential election.
I'm not going to tell you that the Singer piece is the single greatest piece of over-the-top propaganda ever put down in print, because I still remember when Barack Obama was elected. The messianic path media chose to chart covering the 44th president was truly stunning. Oprah Winfrey regarded Obama as 'The One'. A Chicago art gallery featured a piece with Obama under a halo. Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic said, "If Bill Clinton is the Old Testament, Barack Obama is the New Testament." The beatification of Obama became so intense in 2008 that Slate Magazine, of all place, featured a running column called Obama Messiah Watch to encapsulate the most egregious examples of journalists literally worshipping the former President. So this type of media tongue-bathing of political candidates, exclusively Democratic, by the way, is nothing new.
To be fair to the Obama apostles in media, however, they did not have much of an actual track record on which to temper their worship. Obama was young, dynamic, Black, and hadn't done anything except show up to work occasionally in the United States Senate for the first two years of a six-year term. That's it. No record of accomplishments, no record of failures running things. All they had was his own soaring rhetoric, stuff like, 'with his election, the seas would quit rising.' All they had was, to use an expression, hot air, and they got carried away by it.
In Gavin Newsom's case, there's exactly no justification for how far up his caboose Singer chose to travel in order to claim he's the next coming for the Democrats. Unlike Obama, Newsom has a record. A very long and sordid one.
The very beginning of Singer's piece tells you all you need to know about how hard-hitting this attempt at journalism is.
Let’s get this out of the way: He is embarrassingly handsome, his hair seasoned with silver, at ease with his own eminence as he delivers his final State of the State address. “In Washington, the president believes that might makes right,” pronounces California governor Gavin Newsom. “Secret police, businesses raided, windows smashed, citizens detained, citizens shot, masked men snatching people in broad daylight….” His tone is temperate, but the words echo through the State Capitol’s Assembly chamber, the august backdrop for his speech. “Lining the pockets of the rich; crony capitalism at an unimaginable scale,” he goes on. “Rolling back rights…. Rewriting history.” Newsom shakes his head, seeming more mournful than angry. Seeming, yes, presidential. “None of this is normal.”
It must drive Trump nuts. Newsom: lithe, ardent, energetic, a glimmer of optimism in his eye; Kennedy-esque. Add to that his stunning wife and four adorable kids, and the executive strut of a self-made millionaire who has spent the past seven years at the helm of a state big, complex, and rich enough to be a nation of its own. Then there’s the stuff Newsom has been doing.
Hoo-boy. Much too wordy. She could have punctuated the first sentence after embarrasing. No need to make it an adverb to describe handsome. He's been a train-wreck and a national embarrassment for virtually his entire eight years at the helm in California.
Even the way Singer describes the setting for his final, thank God, state of the state address in the Assembly side of the state capitol in Sacramento is absurd. Baseball stadiums these days are considered cathedrals. The teams may suck, but most of the places where Major League Baseball is played are stunning architectural designs and have a lot of cool, unique angles and features. If state capitol chambers are to be compared to the Majors, or the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., the California Assembly would compare to Sam Lynn Ballpark in Bakersfield, California, which used to play home to a Class-A club until they folded. That field was the only one in North America that had to delay afternoon starts, because home plate faced the setting sun and blinded hitters. It was a rotten, ugly place to play ball.
But it's the line about Newsom being a self-made millionaire that has Californians who know better looking for the trash cans in which to hurl. Newsom loves to tell the part of his bio about how his mom and dad divorced, mom struggled, so he struggled. What always gets left out of the mix is that his father managed the J. Paul Getty trust, Getty being the oil tycoon and the richest man in the world at the time. Newsom Sr.'s bestie? Getty's son, Gordon. The Singer piece goes this far, that Gavin may have had access to wealth and some privelege, but that's as far as her Don Lemonesque journalistic integrity will take her.
Her claim right at the outset was that Gavin is a self-made millionaire. That's not even remotely true. Newsom's first business venture, Plumpjack, had a ton of seed money invested in it. Want to take a guess who put in the ante for Gavin's forthcoming millions? His name rhymes with Petty.
Gordon not only invested, but continued to pump in the money as Plumpjack evolved from wine shop to winery to restaurants and hotels in the Golden State. And it was the Getty family, a lot of them, actually, who helped fund his entry into politics, first as county supervisor, then mayor of San Francisco, lieutenant governor, before landing the top job in the state for two terms. Without the Getty's, and then subsequently, Reid Hoffman (yes, Jeffrey Epstein's apparent bestie from the latest release of icky stuff), and Alex Soros. It's not hard to become a millionaire when you mooch off of a handful of multi-billionaires.
Later in the fawn-fest, Singer makes this declaration, with another F.O.G (friend of Gavin), providing the 'evidence.'
Newsom has been vindicated by history. “He believes he’s coming from the right place, and he believes in his ability to get things done, so if he puts himself out there, it’s for the greater good,” says Gatti, thinking through his old friend’s way of choosing his battles.
Vidicated by history? Well, let's look at the last almost eight years of Newsom history in California, shall we?
The budget Newsom inherited in 2018-19 was around $203 billion. It was running a surplus, with around $19 billion in a rainy day fund, and that had been growing in previous years.
Today? The Golden State budget for this year and next is $349 billion, running billions in the red for this year, and according to economists at Stanford's Hoover Institution, has a state deficit - one-year spending, mind you, not accumulated debt, of $73 billion. Newsom is playing a shell game with the numbers, borrowing from estimated future revenues to offset and hide current actual shortfalls until after he leaves office. He's handing a debt bomb to whomever succeeds him, Republican or Democrat.
As for actual long-term debt, both Stanford and Reason economists have independently concluded in their own analyses that California owes over a trillion dollars of unfunded pension liabilities. A trillion dollars. Slick hair and a Vogue puff piece isn't going to hide that from voters in a national presidential campaign.
On homelessness, Gavin Newsom has made that a priority every year of his eight years in office.
Homelessness will never be solved in California under Gavin Newsom.
— Planet Of Memes (@PlanetOfMemes) February 1, 2026
There are too many people making a ton of money from it. pic.twitter.com/Cdli5dlT23
California's taxpayers have now spent, thanks to Gavin and the Democrats, $37 billion dollars to fix the homeless crisis Gavin rinsed and repeated every year. The scoreboard? At least 30-36,000 more homeless people are on the streets of the Golden State as a result. How was the money actually spent? Well, that answer gets nebulous when you ask that of Democrats in Sacramento and the Governor's office.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the director of the Center For Medicare and Medicaid Services, put out this video last week discussing the rampant fraud going on in California under Gavin Newsom's nose.
WATCH: CMS Admin Dr. Oz slams California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
— Resist the Mainstream (@ResisttheMS) February 2, 2026
"The home health care business is being decimated… because so much money is getting sucked to Los Angeles… Gov. Newsom, do your job… You know this is a real problem. People are dying!"pic.twitter.com/yvRnZscHp1
And speaking of missing money and fraud, here's a list of other areas where Gavin and his team of merry Democrats just shrug their shoulders when the auditors come looking.
Let's get this out of the way: he is embarrassingly corrupt. pic.twitter.com/pugIH9hCpQ
— The Ornery Serf (@lanicolai) February 2, 2026
Even a conservative estimate of the health of California's economy under Newsom's watch by Victor Davis Hanson is an unmitigated disaster.
Victor Davis Hanson goes over facts about Gavin Newsom
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) December 8, 2025
- Gavin Newsom right now will likely have a $17 billion deficit
- California has the largest unfunded liability of $250 billion that they don't have the money to meet
- Largest number of homeless
- Largest number of illegal… pic.twitter.com/RAdlzhfwEf
On the jobs front, California by itself is the world's fifth-largest economy, yet boasts the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation, with only the District of Columbia having a worse statistic.
Remember the Scam Tram, the Little Train That Couldn't, the Train from nowhere to nowhere? When Newsom put his hand on something to take the oath of office, and the other hand immediately began reaching into the pockets of every California taxpayer, the boondoggle of all boondoggles had spent around $25 billion dollars to lay exactly zero miles of track between Bakersfield and Modesto. Zero. Not a half-mile, not a tenth of a mile, zero. We're eight years on under Gavin's hope and promise of the California bullet train literally no one will ride. Another $12 billion has been spent. On what? I have no idea. But I know on what it hasn't been spent - track. The project still has not laid so much as a foot of line to shorten the distance between, *checks notes*, two places that are both in the middle of nowhere. There are no plans in the near future to lay track. But there are, or were plans to keep spending that money until President Donald Trump killed the project a couple months ago via executive order.
Without Trump's action, California's Scam Tram was estimated to cost $110 billion and be finished sometime after my kids become a worm feast. Compare that to Japan's Maglev train, which was just clocked at 310 miles-per-hour in testing for Phase 1.
Reporters are left speechless after getting a glimpse of Japan’s new (“bullet”) train, the Maglev going 310 mph. pic.twitter.com/rrzpTnTDoe
— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) February 3, 2026
How much will it cost Japan to build it? $75 billion. And the terminal point for the initial phase is Tokyo, which is a city that actually has a lot of people living in it, unlike Modesto.
And lastly, the fires that consumed hundreds of homes in Altadena and Pacific Palisades burned just over a year ago. Has construction been robust and ongoing, being that Gavin promised there would be zero red tape? Of course, not. He never wanted new single family residences. He wants high-density, low-income housing. He wants the shoreline, some of the most pristine oceanview land in the world to be built, eventually, into Newsom tenanment housing.
Donald Trump put a stop to that, too, and has now charged EPA administrator Lee Zeldin to bigfoot Newsom and the state and streamline the permitting and building.
🚨 NEW: Trump’s new 'LA permitting czar' Lee Zeldin FIRES UP the rebuild after wildfires: “This needs to move at Trump speed!”
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) February 2, 2026
No red tape. No excuses. Get Angelenos into new homes FAST. pic.twitter.com/7cxuftlPal
Newsom's hair, embarrassingly good looks, and the fact that his reproductive organs work as advertised may make for wonderful Vogue porn. But to those of us who know better, the ones who have fled California for redder state pastures and suckers like me who remain here for the weather and the economic masochism, Gavin is next cycle's Kamala Harris - no real upside, and huge political liabilities.
Harris couldn't articulate her way out of a paper sack. Newsom lies his way out of uncomfortable spots through bravado, bluster, and body movements that make you think he contracted Tim Walz' jazz hands and the condition went systemic. Harris ran from the fact she had no experience on which to run. Gavin can't run fast enough from the record he can't defend.
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